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Writers Say They Feel Censored By Surveillance
schwit1 writes with news about the impact of government surveillance on authors and their work worldwide . A survey of writers around the world by the PEN American Center has found that a significant majority said they were deeply concerned with government surveillance, with many reporting that they have avoided, or have considered avoiding, controversial topics in their work or in personal communications as a result. The findings show that writers consider freedom of expression to be under significant threat around the world in democratic and nondemocratic countries. Some 75 percent of respondents in countries classified as "free," 84 percent in "partly free" countries, and 80 percent in countries that were "not free" said that they were "very" or "somewhat" worried about government surveillance in their countries. The survey, which will be released Monday, was conducted anonymously online in fall 2014 and yielded 772 responses from fiction and nonfiction writers and related professionals, including translators and editors, in 50 countries.
I feel complete free to write about XXXXX XXX XXXXXX. I don't feel censored or restricted in any way.
When I was under surveillance I'd send "suspicious" messages to myself to keep them busy chasing ghosts.
When I took an airplane flight to Las Vegas a few years ago, I left my laptop at home and took a notebook with me for writing. Although a notebook can be confiscated and read by the police, you have more constitutional rights with dead-tree data than digital data.
I don't think they feel threatened (at least in "free" countries) about writing on a controversial topic but rather inconvenienced about the hassle it might cause if their work was to be scrutinized by said govt. entities. Especially a govt. entity trying to justify its existence/budget in this relatively non-govt-trusting environment.
There are plenty of writers writing all manner of content, with the acceptability of government nosing around their lives.
I tend to agree that a writer should be able to write whatever they choose, the ever present govt. watch that unconsciously or consciously leads to self censoring is clearly something that has been around forever, and just more pronounced in its presence in today's world.
It's working exactly as it should. People are learning to restrain themselves out of fear. Soon nobody will dare challenge the system. Victory is ours!
Just wait until TPP then Mr. Orwell's work will be completed.
The government doesn't have a panopticon.
Even if it did, it shouldn't make a difference what you write anyway. Writing for any sort of career is public to begin with, if you were only writing love notes to yourself, I doubt the government would care unless it had a very specific interest in you particularly.
Point being, there is the irrational sense that since they know the government is watching, writers may be outed or made a target somehow. Problem is, they don't need to be monitoring you in real-time for the government to eventually pick up a book or essay of yours from the archives and find out what sort of an anarcho-pinko-terrorist you are.
Aside from performance artists, writing is one of the original ways for you to get your ideas out there, and it predates the Internet by millenia. Writers have been discovered and imprisoned or harmed for their writing long before Internet surveillance, so I am not sure how this is new, except that it may now be somewhat more efficient.
I understand the sarcasm, but there are tons of other ways that cause self-censorship:
1: Religious extremists. Salman Rushdie. Enough said.
2: The fact that one's future in a lot of lines of work can hang on what one has written. There are quite a number of businesses who snoop on people's FB pages, and regardless of settings, can get both private messages, wall, group posts, and other items... then present it to a user. Slashdot had a post about this a year or two ago about a private message about "press '1' for English" being enough to flag someone as "racist" and thus cause them to not be able to be hired.
3: The fact that there are LEOs out there, domestic and foreign, looking at posts and will happily use that as grounds for arrest. Not just LEOs of one country. With extradition treaties, handing out church bulletins or a picture posts of eating a BLT can be grounds for being arrested, hauled to Saudi Arabia and burned/beheaded. A good example of this are the Aussies and New Zealanders who committed no crimes domestically, but are shipped across the pond to face trial for crimes in another country. It only is a matter of time before this reverses, and someone who makes fun of the Thailand royalty in the US gets shipped over there for lese majeste violations, as per the signed and ratified extradition treaties.
4: Extradition treaties aside, one can be arrested when they set foot in another country for something they wrote years to decades ago.
5: A major complaint against some big companies almost always results in a "pay for this to be retracted in every national newspaper or expect to be sued into the ground" notice. They have the battalions of lawyers to make this actually work.
6: On a smaller scale, even a one star Yelp review can result in lawsuits. They don't even have to have merit... a place can file until a judge smacks them with a vexatious litigant tag... and this can cause the guy who had poor service to be ruined completely.
7: The local gangs. Someone mentions a local gang on social media, it can get back to the shot caller pretty quickly, who can do a reply with a drive-by.
So they polled a group whose main focus is freedom of expression, and found out that the members are concerned about freedom of expression. Shocking. Next up, poll of members of the ARRL detemines that 84% of the people are interested in ham radio.
This article mentions only feelings - no actual data. Yes, the NSA may be watching but has the government arrested anyone for what they wrote?
In the USA, I am more afraid of my fellow citizens than the government. Especially the religious nuts.
Appologies. On a phone and screwed up, I ment number three not one.
I'm not a professional writer/journalist/etc., but as a normal U.S. citizen, and *especially* after 9/11/2001, I have felt like certain topics must be tread upon very carefully when conversing with others online. My own Facebook posts, comments and even "liking" something that might be considered contreversial seemingly spawns a new process in my brain that wants to ask the question, "Should I really?"
This is probably the most powerful aspect of a surveilled people. If you want to control minds and mouths, you make them hesitant to speak or even think thoughts that might be viewed by others as risky. When people feel constantly judged, whether its by thoughts written, spoken or simply within their own minds, you have them "under control".
So what's the answer, then? IMHO people simply need more courage to say, 'Fuck you, I don't care what you think of me' because they are brave enough to stand up for themselves (and others). Once this mentality is in place, people start being normal again. Genuine, caring, loving and unjudgemental. Maybe the people who search XKEYSCORE will have to start to understand that peoples' words don't necessarily reflect future actions.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Salman Rushdie
I'm not a professional writer, but I think this age of social networking must have a chilling effect on speech, even if you discount government surveillance. I personally have become very careful about what I say online, and I'm not eager to have my real name associated with anything I do say. I've had someone (who was sort of a friend) pick up on the wording of some random innocuous Facebook post, interpret it in a way that made it sound misogynous, and then harass me and badmouth me on Facebook. I've had stuff like that happen a few times.
It also makes me think of another incident, and I'm just glad I was using an account that was unconnected to any of my personal accounts. I was talking on a public web forum, and voiced an opinion to the effect of, "even child abusers deserve due process." Another anonymous user responded claiming that the only reason I would say something like that is if I were a child molester myself. I didn't think much of it, because who cares, right? By the time 24 hours had passed, I had 50 messages in my Inbox from different people, yelling at me for for being a child molester and threatening to track me down. This was literally based on nothing except a random comment in favor of following the law, which was interpreted as being sympathetic to child abuse.
Now, it might sound like I'm just a complete asshole who says terrible things, and then gets upset when people don't like them. And yeah, every once in a while I do get pretty aggressive in arguments, but I don't think it's too bad. I suppose you can look at my post history and judge for yourself, since I don't censor myself too much on this site. I've had a few people attack me a bit on Slashdot for things that I thought were pretty innocuous posts, but oddly nothing as aggressive and offensive as some of the attacks I've gotten on Facebook from supposed friends, so I'm not very careful here. However, I have had someone get annoyed with me and use some kind of bot to mod down every single post that I made.
But speaking less about myself, and getting back to the point, I'm worried about the effect these kinds of things have on communication. We've developed a mode of communication where we can talk to each other and publish our thoughts very easily, but meanwhile we've fostered a culture around that communication that's very aggressive. Everyone's picking apart everything you say, looking for a way to be harsh and critical. You have reddit and 4chan lynch mobs trying to find and punish people without having their facts straight. Public figures are being brought to disgrace due to personal communications they thought were private-- which isn't always so bad, but also isn't always productive.
I don't know. I feel it. If you gave everyone free access to all of my communications, I would honestly not be worried about my friends or family or the government reading it, as much as I'd be worried about the masses to stupid people who might take offense to something that isn't a real problem and isn't any of their business. When I post something publicly on purpose, my biggest concern is that someone I barely know will find some meaning in some little throw-away phrase, take it completely out of context, and use it as a basis as some kind of crazy vendetta.
Wasn't it the same thing then, with the Red Scare? Hollywood saw it's blacklisting of suspected communists, nevermind actual validation of those accused. I'm sure the 'pen' community treaded carefully then, possibly more so than now. With the age of information we're in, I'd argue the 'Streisand Effect' would guaruntee a certain measure of success, counter to any fears one may have about given content. Unless you were actively tied to a specific event, terrorism... beyond that of a guilty media verdict, I'd venture it's far safer now than ever to push the envelope.
Interesting, thanks stranger.
its referred to as 'the chilling effect' and actions like the edward snowden witch hunt and warrantless detention of journalists in the UK are performed intentionally in order to ensure it remains an effective tool of the state. The things you write about, including the things you research, have enormous consequences. Become too curious about government policies and procedures? The government will have you quietly added to a secret list of people who cannot fly on a plane without meaningless scrutiny. Write a book on how to defeat pseudoscience like polygraph tests? You'll enjoy more than a few nights in jail. People forget that Theo De Raadt was once not only defunded from, but barred entirely from his own conference for speaking out critically of the US governments involvement in iraq. and its not just confined to literature, but code as well. Did you write any ToR code or the exploit to detect cellular phreaking devices secretly used by the government? Maybe bluetooth code to access passports?
it comes down to this: Anything that cannot be marginalized, or trivialized as unamerican and antipatriotic becomes a direct threat to the ruling establishment and while they arent comfortable silencing your freedom of speech, theyre more than capable of making your life a living hell. Ask Chelsea Manning about her christmas.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Half of the US citizens participating on Slashdot would have been arrested by now and locked away in Gitmo. Take a look at the comments online about any controversial topic. If anything the number of people willing to voice extreme political views in public increasing, not decreasing. Paranoid people with persecution complexes like to feel paranoid. Its a way for them to fluff their own ego to think a big evil government conspiracy is out to oppress them, agents actively reading all their email and communications, even though in reality they are completely unimportant and are not even a blip of the government's radar. The Snowden revelations for these type of people are a gift that keeps on giving.
This isn't about how you or your mom use explorer or finder or midnight commander to traverse the directory tree, reading file names and/or looking at icons.
This is about how someone actually trained to find stuff, finds stuff. And aside from outright encryption or sophisticated codes, you can't hide something from such people. Heck, you can't even hide the encrypted result; all you can do is prevent entry (and that, only until a judge says "you will open that door" because at that point, if you don't, the consequences are likely to be worse than if you had opened it in the first place. Like indefinite imprisonment until you do give it up.)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Orwell was an optimist.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
The idea of rights is a lovely philosophical butterfly.
The actuality of rights is that they are only rules that those in power agree to enforce and are able to enforce.
The direct consequences of these facts are obvious. Act accordingly.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I'm sure many of us would like to know how you were able to stop being under surveillance.
I come here for the love
Maybe you're missing the "why" of 99% of this .
The "Why" is the United States.
The economic impact on this is drastic.
The USA ain't free by any standard definition.
...is when we can watch the watchers;
Let's explain this: 2-way circuits, where watched and watcher are in total symmetry in an unambiguous way.
http://balder.org/judea/Hate-Speech-Laws-Immigration-Jewish-Influence-Britain.php
Anybody care to discuss? Why pretend you are concerned about the problem, when you don't want people to be able to even talk about who is actually behind it all, because "the TV told you so"...
I write on issues of concern to my profession. Self-censorship arises more out of concern with how certain corporate interests will respond than it does to concerns about how my government will respond. It's not that I'll be thrown in jail, or renditioned or whatever that concerns me. It's that if I acted in the public's best interest and told it like it is, I'd become unemployable and destitute.
though it does tend to cause people think more carefully about what they'd like to say.
"Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup."
OP here: I agree, unfortunately many disagree and believe that the only form of censorship requires a law. I'm still unclear what type of law this needs to be (muni, state/province, country, union).
Why are Americans suddenly thinking those treaties are fair and equitable? They're not; the important provisions are unilateral, allowing the USA to ignore the rules.
That might contradict the 'statue of limitations' rule?
transfer your writing across sneaker net in some seedy cyber cafe and you are publishing your subversive thoughts to the chagrin of governments everywhere! you could even wear a fedora to make you feel clandestine and important, and match your OS.
feeling censored you say. . . It's probably all the Surveillance
Pretty hard to be a writer on any subject, fiction or nonfiction, without research. Pretty hard these days to do research without the internet.
It's passive-aggressive form of censorship, but freedom of expression is stifled all the same.
Especially seeing that that was the goal of the surveillance, not an unintended side effect.
Here's the actual report in case anyone is interested.
Spoken like a NSA agent hired to discredit or weaken the stories like the one posted.
How deep of a search do you imagine at an airport screening though?
Depends on who is searching. Depends on the on site equipment they have to conduct the search. There are a lot of factors.
For example, if I wanted to see most recent documents, and I had appropriate workstations available, in about 10-15 minutes, if I though you were worthy of a deep search, by looking at date stamps and sector sparing tables for las sectors pared, and which files they are attributed to, I could likely find everything that changed on the disk from 5 days before you booked the ticket, up to now.
Even if things are encrypted, that's information, and there are exposed timestamps that could tell me if I should copy/confiscate for further examination, and/or find something incriminating to hold you personally on, or hold you on the suspicion of having done.
... the best way to do it is to get to know some of those extremists to understand their ISLAM OR DIE pov
And in order to get to know those Islamic extremists I need to go to some of those Islamic extremism sites and start posting
Under present circumstance, if I were to do that, automatically I am under the radar of the so-called 'security agency' and everything I do, online or off, will be monitored
How many writers that you know would want to go through all that troubles in the first place?
The aim of our torture program was to induce a state of "learned helplessness" where the subject stopped resisting even when the threats were removed. If people fear speaking out due to illegal spying then I guess it is "Mission Accomplished". I'd say more, but I'm afraid to speak out
From what I understand I can not go to germany due to an adult site I used to own and me refusing to comply with their laws, that would hurt my business. I was legal in the USA and the majority of the world as far as I know, I had no reason to comply and hurt my own bottom line..
I censor what I write on facebook, very heavily due to current and future employers, I also delete all my posts every month or so and use higher security settings. Almost seems like too much work sometimes and I don't bother posting at all..
I use an alias whenever possible and just flat out try to never use my real name on anything on the internet ever. I use a different alias on every site now, though I need to start new accounts on some sites from when I did not do that.
Here's a bit, suitably edited, I wrote about this just the other day in the context of some fellow who rode in on the "just don't commit a crime and you'll be ok" horse:
The web of law is now so complex and deep that anyone is bound to make a miss-step fairly often or otherwise unexpectedly end up on the wrong side of the law and so turn out to be, regardless of intentionality (remember, ignorance of the law is no excuse), "a [darned] criminal."
From commonly ignored law (speeding, spitting, littering, jaywalking, "sharing" music or software, smoking somewhere you aren't allowed to, smoking pot, privately accepting or giving a prescription medication) to unintentional errors (walking by a partially unblocked window undressed, backing into someone else's vehicle, parking in a prohibited location) to intentional but with no knowledge of criminality (intentionally connecting to anyone's open wifi network without permission, collecting vertebrate fossils on public land, possessing too many bottles of NyQuil, having both bleach and ammonia under your sink, buying and storing too much of certain fertilizers) to being drawn in without intent (defending yourself, your family, your friend, defending your home, finding drugs or other prohibited materials in your home that you did put there)... and of course this is just the tip of the iceberg for all those categories and there are others such as a whole host of entrapment mechanisms, from chat room honeypots to speed traps and so on.
At this point, interaction with the authorities can arise; and that in itself is fraught with various types of risk, including the commission, or just the accusation, of further criminal activity. Resisting arrest, flight, striking a LEO, etc. These may not even be true accusations, but generally speaking, they might as well be because when it comes to difference in reporting between you and a LEO in court, or even for the benefit of a grand jury (which is run by the prosecutor already after you, btw), your word will weigh far less than theirs. You'll need something else, like a video (or many) and even then, you may not find yourself out of legal hot water.
Another problem is that both the feds and the states have begun implementing ex post facto laws. These are laws that make something illegal after the act, and/or increase the punishment for an act after one has been sentenced for it, and/or alter the rules of evidence from those in effect when the act occurred. So among other things, what you do today that is legal, may not only be illegal tomorrow, but could conceivably make you a criminal after the fact; likewise, the punishment they assign you today may mutate into something far more draconian tomorrow (this kind of thing is a matter of record at this point.)
All of these things, and an astonishingly large number of others that fall into the same categories, can create an "Ooops, I'm a criminal" facet of our lives -- even when our intentions are clearly and strongly -- other.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
They know your IP; they see the traffic and they record it and they will have zero trouble identifying you if they decide they want to. There's a trail of breadcrumbs that leads directly to your computer for everything you do on the net. That's without the tricks of textual analysis they can apply to your known writing style.
Anonymous posting on the net at this point in time shields you only from your average citizen's inclination to take action. In no way does it shield you from the government if the government wants to know. And they don't have to want to know today. They can decide they want to know retroactively, and there you are -- bent over, pants down, no lube in sight. And they've got a pineapple.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
> With extradition treaties, handing out church bulletins or a picture posts of eating a BLT can be grounds for being arrested, hauled to Saudi Arabia and burned/beheaded.
It is nearly impossible to extradite someone from a country for an act that is not a crime in that country. Even when it is locally illegal, there are still limits like the potential for a level of punishment that exceeds what is allowed in that country. That's why european countries won't extradite someone to the US for a crime where capital punishment is a possible sentence.
All too often people have suffered due to the listener having a false perception of what a speaker or writer says. A great example are the numbers of priests, nuns and protestant missionairies who have been murdered in south America. It seems the rich land owners tend to equate Christian doctrines with communism. The words of Christ do pretty much condem the rich and they feel that such teachings can inspire the people into a communist revolution. To them bagging someone who preaches the gospel is a fine thing to do.
Replying to undo "Redundant" mod.
Parent heads off the practically inevitable trivializations of how universal surveillance produces a chilling effect, squelching dissent and suppressing critiques that would uncover, for example, corporate malfeasance and government corruption.
Additionally, the surveillance regime of early the early 21st-century United States is one of the greatest ideological errors and phenomenological atrocities of human history. I'm not sure there exist (nor can exist) a human institution more worrisome or troubling without its being coupled to an enforcement regime which—as we all too plainly know—the system of US surveillance is.
blog
P. S. I meant to mod GP "Insightful", which it most certainly is.
Please mod GP up.
blog
"When I post something publicly on purpose, my biggest concern is that someone I barely know will find some meaning in some little throw-away phrase, take it completely out of context, and use it as a basis as some kind of crazy vendetta."
Like the media does on a daily basis....And the shame of it is that people are willing to listen to a sound byte and accept it as the whole truth, context be damned.
that IS a good point.
still, there are, apparently, legions of people who are maintaining annonymity online while engaging not just in research, but outright hostile attacks. It would seem that it's possible to keep a low profile while researching sensitive subjects.
Its to the point we really don't have "rights", but "privledges", and there is no real clear line to cross, and we have a government that doesn't seem to diffrentiate between dissent and flat out rebellion.
Do you have any cases of extradition being successful over an alleged act that isn't illegal in both countries? I haven't heard of any. As far as "no crime committed domestically", what do you mean? If an Australian commits a crime in Australia, who's going to want to extradite him?
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Kim DotCom?
Kim Dotcom is alleged to have committed crimes in the US, and I think New Zealand has the concept of criminal copyright infringement. Obviously the US authorities have pushed the NZ authorities to exceed their authority, but we'll have to see whether the NZ courts allow extradition.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes